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The team from Charity Navigator, the nation's largest independent charity evaluator and leading donor advocate, shares their thoughts on emerging nonprofit-sector issues and offers tips to better inform your intelligent giving decisions.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Donor Privacy Policies

One of
the concerns we hear about most from donors is that their support to one
charity they truly want to fund will result in them being inundated with solicitation requests from other charities that they never intended to hear from or fund. A donor who decides to support a charity with
their hard earned money should know, up front, as to how their personal
information will be handled. Charity
Navigator makes that point as clear as day to donors by virtue of our
charity ratings. Since 2004, our ratings have included an assessment of each charity’s donor privacy policy. More recently, our analysts noticed some policies that were less than 100% clear. Such cases left donors to wonder if their contact information was only protected if they donated online and not if they contributed by mail. To remedy this, we've implementedmore stringent donor privacy policy disclosure requirements.Our standards require that charities be crystal clear
in regards to all aspects of how they protect their donors' information in order to be eligible
for full credit for our privacy metric.

While some charities may take exception and consider list
sharing/selling a common practice that is justified, we do not. When a donor enters into a funding relationship
with a charity, that relationship should be coveted and not taken for granted
nor abused.